Preference-driven systems: a practical bridge to intent-driven systems
July 21st, 2025 • Comments Off on Preference-driven systems: a practical bridge to intent-driven systemsIntent-driven orchestration has emerged as a effective model for managing increasingly complex, distributed systems. Rather than prescribing how infrastructure should behave, intent allows users to declare what outcomes or objectives they want systems to fulfill. This paradigm shifts control from static configurations to adaptive, context-aware orchestration. Examples of such approaches are already available, such as Intel’s Intent-Driven Orchestration planner for Kubernetes or TM Forum’s intent ontology, which provide a structured way to express high-level business and service goals that can be interpreted by autonomous systems.
Intent-driven systems offer several advantages and can be effectively combined with declarative orchestration and management approaches. These models are not mutually exclusive — in fact, when used together, they can deliver the best of both worlds: clear goal expression and programmable control. Here’s why intents are particularly powerful (adapted from this blog post):
- Semantic Portability: Intents define what needs to be achieved (e.g., “ensure 10ms tail latency”), not how to achieve it (e.g., “allocate 10 vCPUs”). This abstraction enables portability across heterogeneous platforms. While infrastructure may vary, the meaning of the intent — such as latency targets — remains consistent.
- Intent as Invariant: Because intents focus on outcomes rather than implementation, resource providers have the freedom to optimize — change hardware, reconfigure topology, shift workloads — as long as they uphold the declared expectations. This flexibility supports resilience and continuous optimization.
- Context-Aware Optimization: Intents offer (e.g., “favor performance over power consumption”) gives orchestrators crucial context. This enables systems to make informed trade-offs, and take decisions to better align with user objectives.
It’s a powerful vision — and arguably the north star for upcoming orchestration and management systems. However, realizing it at scale remains a challenge.
The Reality of Interface Inertia
Intent requires shared semantics between users and resource providers. These semantics must be embedded in APIs, orchestration layers, and policy engines — all of which take time to evolve and gain adoption. In many systems today, APIs are still tightly coupled to implementation details. Even where abstraction exists, it often lacks the richness to fully express intent in a way that systems can reliably act on.
As a result, adoption of intent-based orchestration has been slower than hoped. Infrastructure providers need time to align on standards, support new interfaces, and re-architect parts of their platforms. Application owners, meanwhile, still operate in environments where procedural configurations are the norm.
A Middle Ground: Preference-Driven Orchestration
As an interim step, a preference-driven orchestration model offers a practical path forward.
Rather than fully declaring objectives and invariants, users can express preferences — high-level hints about how orchestration decisions should be made. These preferences are not strict requirements, but they provide meaningful guidance to the orchestration layer.
Examples of such preferences might include:
- “Prefer performance over energy efficiency”
- “Minimize cost where possible”
- “Favor locality to user region”
- “No need to boost this best effort app”
- “This is a <important|besteffort|background, …> task”
These could be defined as simple profiles, annotations, or lightweight policy templates. Unlike full intent, preferences don’t require formal semantics or guaranteed enforcement — they simply steer the system toward user-aligned decisions in environments where exact guarantees are not yet feasible.
Why Preferences Matter
- Feasible Today: Preferences can be layered onto existing APIs and orchestrators with minimal disruption, making them more readily adoptable.
- Low Risk, High Value: Because preferences are advisory rather than declarative, they don’t require full support from every system component. Partial adherence still improves system alignment with user goals.
- Prepares the Ground for Intent: By introducing users to higher-level abstractions and aligning systems with those abstractions incrementally, preferences create a pathway toward more formal intent expression over time.
Improves Portability and Contextualization: Even when resource providers cannot guarantee intent satisfaction, understanding user preferences provides valuable context for optimizing placement, configuration, and trade-off decisions.
From Preferences to Intent
Over time, preference-driven orchestration can evolve naturally into full intent-driven models. As infrastructure layers mature and standard semantics emerge, preferences can be promoted to soft intents, and eventually to hard objectives with measurable enforcement.
This progression mirrors other transitions in computing — from imperative to declarative configuration, from manual scaling to autoscaling, from static placement to adaptive scheduling. Each step builds on the last, gradually shifting the responsibility from the user to the system.
Intent-driven orchestration remains a powerful vision for the future of cloud, edge, and distributed computing. But recognizing the complexity of reaching that goal, a preference-driven approach offers a practical, incremental step. By enabling systems to make smarter decisions today — with minimal disruption — preferences pave the way for a more intelligent, adaptive, and user-aligned orchestration model tomorrow.
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